We love the indomitable bellicose patriotism that sets you apart; we love the national pride that guides your muscularly courageou...s race; we love the potent individualism that doesn't prevent you from opening your arms to individualists of every land, whether libertarians or anarchists.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revo...lution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizons; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent a...ssault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The past is necessarily inferior to the future. That is how we wish it to be. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dange...rous enemy: the past, gloomy prevaricator, execrable tutor?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for the... eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »